Kenne Dein Korpus(system) gut?

The paper deals with necessary deliberation when doing corpus analysis. Therefore, two examples for linguistic questions were addressed to two different corpora, that is one meta corpus as part of the corpora of the DWDS (Berlin), and one corpus archive of the corpora of the IDS (Mannheim). The first example aims at semantics and pragmatics of the neologism Alltagsrassismus (everyday racism). The second example addresses a question arising in teaching German as a Foreign Language: Should nouns always be learnt with the definite article? What if other types of articles are more frequent? The paper focus ›step by step‹ on thoughts of a corpus user to explore which characteristics of a corpus might have an impact on the results. One outcome is that the corpus itself isn’t the only thing you have to consider; in addition, the characteristics of the research engine and of the related lexicographical information in a ›corpus-dictionary-system‹ play an important role and should be known as well. But this task turns out to be much more complex than using a corpus alone.